I dont think newpipe would protect from this since it still contacts the yt servers to pull the video. Peertube or a VPN would stop this though.

I just found out that Lemmy is not allowing (or has rate-limited, or whatever) VPN connections to post or react.

Not a fan of that at all.

Could be your instance. World is behind cloudflare after all.

World and NordVPN. Recommend another instance?

The instance my account is on, dbzer0, was set up by a former mod of the piracy subreddit. Can’t say for certain, but I’d expect that VPNs would work with it. The admin really seems to know his shit.